Thursday 12 July 2007 06.58 EDT
First published on Thursday 12 July 2007 06.58 EDT

Roger Federer's fifth successive Wimbledon win was watched by 500 million people, earned him £700,000, and generated column inches throughout the world. By contrast, Lin Dan's victory in the biggest match in the badminton calendar, the 97th All England Open Championships in March, earned him just £8,000 and generated approximately three column inches in the world's press.

Yet which sport is the most popular in the UK in terms of participation: tennis or badminton? No question, it's badminton. There are currently four million active, competitive badminton players in the UK, placing the sport second only behind football.

Badminton has other things going for it as well. It's a faster game than tennis, and more intense too. The fastest recorded smash - 206mph by Fu Haifeng - is a great deal sharper than Andy Roddick's 153mph record serve in tennis. And while badminton matches are shorter, a comparative study of the Wimbledon final in 1990 and the World Badminton Championships final of the same year demonstrated that badminton has a match intensity (percentage of time the ball/shuttle is in play) of 48% versus 9% in tennis; and an average of 13.5 shots per rally against tennis's 3.5. In other words, badminton will give you more intensity and more shots over a shorter period of time - and has a huge number of players who are interested in the game. It should be a TV's scheduler's dream, but usually badminton is lucky to get 30 seconds on Transworld Sport.

So why is tennis so popular compared to badminton? Partly because tennis got there first. It was branded on the public and media consciousness as early as 1936, when TV cameras recorded Fred Perry stroking his gentlemanly way to glory at Wimbledon in his own urbane and commanding manner. The All England Badminton tournament was finally broadcast in 1951, but by then it had already missed the boat. A template for coverage of racket sports had been laid down. Even in the 1990s, when big servers were rendering Wimbledon unwatchable, tennis's hegemony was unshakeable.

This all-powerful grip, combined in the UK with the public's obsession with a Brit winning Wimbledon has meant that the UK's achievements with a shuttlecock have gone largely unnoticed. There have been a string of players in the world top 10, both male and female, who have regularly delivered tournament wins. Nathan Robertson - whose talent was discussed with Federer-like wonder when he came through as a junior - spent most of his career scrabbling around for funding until a silver medal in the Athens Olympics led to a modest jamboree for him and playing partner Gail Emms. Juxtapose this experience against those of comparable talents such as Andy Murray and Tim Henman.

Badminton has had its own superstars. Rudy Hartono of Indonesia was the Rod Laver of his time, winning the All England title eight times between 1968 and 1976; Denmark's Morten "Mr Badminton" Frost in the 1980s; Hariyanto Arbi and Taufik Hidayat in the 1990s and beyond. However, you will struggle to find anyone outside the game who has heard of them. Hidayat walked out of a tournament semi-final last year after a disputed line call; had that been Federer it would have been back-page news.

There is, however, a more basic problem than player profile. The technical variety that makes badminton so intensely challenging to play is equally challenging for the small screen to present in an entertaining and inclusive way: the viewer cannot actually see the shuttle very well on TV; the tactics are a mystery to people who don't play the game; and the commentators used by the BBC, for example, seem to know very little about what they are watching and so struggle to inform or entertain.

Whereas in tennis, any person looking on can appreciate the athletic and aesthetic value of a running Federer pass or a Steffi Graf forehand, no one would watch badminton, witness a fabulous smash defence or disguised cross-court drop, and gasp. It's just not the same as Boris Becker throwing himself across the court headlong is it?

Badminton is trying to be proactive in its attempts to arrest this imbalance. This year, a 12-tournament worldwide Super Series has been launched, which will lead to a Super Series Final at the end of the season with prize money in excess of £250,000. Top players' earnings should increase considerably. Korea's Kim Dong-moon won an incredible seven Grand Prix titles in 2002, but walked away as the sport's top earner with the paltry sum of £35,000 in his pocket.

To help attract a wider audience the scoring system has been changed too: games are now played to 21 and the rule where a player could only score on their own serve has been scrapped. Matches are shorter, so they should appeal more to TV bosses. In some markets - particularly in the Far East - the game is huge; TV figures for one match during the Athens Olympics topped 80 million in China. Even in the UK, five million watched the Emms-Robertson final. But with sports coverage at saturation point all over the world and the press so fixated on the one racket sport that matters commercially, badminton will be trailing behind tennis for a while yet.